On occasion, a member of our team calls in sick and is either unwilling, or unable, to set their Out of Office message in Exchange.

What we've done in the past is just reset that user's password, give it to their manager, and have the manager set the Out of Office message. At other times, managers have kept spreadsheets containing users' passwords (without IT's knowledge!) so that they don't have to involve us at all.

We're thinking there has to be a better way...and that we can't possibly be the first organization to have this problem.

4 Answers
4

There is no way to do it from the Exchange system Manager, but you can give yourself FULL access to their mailbox, and the profile, and do it that way. Then you don't have to change the password. As Kara pointed out, instead of the profile, if you have outlook web access enabled (OWA), you can use that.

Please first go into ADUC (Active
Directory Users and Computers), expand
the domain, locate the Users, in the
right panel, find the user that you
need to set the Out Of Office.

Right click it, in the Exchange
Advanced tab, click Mailbox Rights,
confirm your account has the rights
for read permissions and full mailbox
access. Then click OK.

After that, please open Control Panel,
locate Mail icon, double click it,
click Show Profiles button, click Add
button, then follow the wizard to
create the user profile. When you are
prompted to input the user account and
password, please input your account
and password instead of the user
profile itself.

I created a user account that has full mailbox access to every mailbox (you can grant this at the level of the server).

I then wrote a little program that runs with these permissions, but set up in such a way that the user accessing the program does not need the password. This is done by running the program on a web server using impersonation.

Note that you will need to have Outlook installed on the web server you run this on, as it uses MAPI to connect to the mailserver (you also need a reference at the project level to Microsoft CDO Library, which is MAPI). As long as you are all one Exchange Organisation, it doesn't matter which mailserver - Exchange will redirect the app to the right server.

You can use the section of your web.config to restrict access to the app to your helpdesk and sysadmins so ordinary users can't access the application themselves.

You didn't say what version of Exchange you had, but it looks like it will be possible to set the message via a powershell script in Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007 if you install EWS Managed API. Right now it appears this is only available as a release candidate though.